


An Affinity for Bees

by shouldbeover



Series: The Man No One Liked Universe [7]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Acceptance, Bee keeping, Grief, M/M, Retirement, biography, tuberculosis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-15
Updated: 2013-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-04 16:28:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1083167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shouldbeover/pseuds/shouldbeover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The Man No One Liked" universe. The year is 1950, Sherlock and John have retired to Surrey where Sherlock keeps bees, but all stories end, and all hearts are broken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Affinity for Bees

**Author's Note:**

> At last, the long promised, long feared "final" chapter in the TMNOL universe. It was hard to write. I hope it isn't a disappointment. Thoughtfully betated by red_chapel but then abused again by me. All mistakes mine.

“I want a cigarette. Give me a cigarette.”

“You haven’t had a cigarette since the war.”

“Yes, and I’ve wanted a cigarette since the war. Give it to me. I want one.”

“I don’t have one and, as you well know, you can’t have one. They don’t allow it.”

Sherlock waved his hand dismissively, although whether at John or the staff, or the entirety of Arizona, it was hard to say. It might have been at the world.

“I want a whiskey.”

“You know you can’t have that either.”

John managed to read six pages of _Middlemarch_ before Sherlock spoke again, a sad wistfulness in his voice that belied the crassness of the words. “I want your cock in my mouth.”

John sighed and looked pointedly back at his book. They’d had this conversation before. Or rather, they had consciously not had it, because when Sherlock would start, John would refuse to go on. 

“I want to go home, John. I hate it here.” He said it so quietly that his voice was almost lost to the whipping of the bleached white sheets separating the patients along the sanatorium’s veranda. 

John looked at the broad landscape to where it disappeared into the red of the setting sun. “England is too damp for your lungs.”

Sherlock plucked at his blanket with his long, boney fingers, and said, “It doesn’t matter.”

This then was what John did not want to discuss. “There’s been all that success with Streptomycin. Dr. Anajit is going to try it here and—”

“John,” Sherlock stopped him. “My lungs are in tatters. It’s too late. I want to die in England. I want to see our friends and sit in the garden and listen to the bees.” He put his hand out to grasp John’s. “I want to lie in your arms at night. I don’t want to be alone if…when...”

Sherlock broke off to cough, wet and rasping. “Please, John,” he whispered when he could speak again. 

John shut his eyes against their watering. Something, a door deep within him, seemed to close. “Alright,” he said, “We’ll go home.”

“Thank you.”

Sherlock seemed somewhat revived once they were back home in Surrey, surrounded by his familiar things. He even went out to tend to his bees and tut over their treatment while he was gone. Mercifully they had returned to find a high English summer, those near miraculous days of warm sun and gentle breezes, and John was grateful for it. But he knew the seeming recovery was an illusion and, like the lovely weather, would soon be gone.

As soon as the cold English rain began again, Sherlock’s cough worsened, and he quickly grew tired from his constant struggle to breathe. Some of the villagers, although Sherlock had never been at any great pains to know them, came by with preserves and pies, words of advice and home remedies. “My great-uncle took a mixture of nutmeg and ginger dissolved in honey with his tea and he came through diphtheria with nary a scratch,” said one sage. John thanked him and when he shared the comment with Sherlock they laughed until John was wheezing as much as Sherlock.

Friends came for long chats, or sometimes simply to sit with John and Sherlock in front of the fireplace in peaceful companionship. Sherlock wrote letters to others, or dictated them to John until his voice gave out. As John addressed the envelopes he was struck by how Sherlock, once a servant, had come to mingle freely with the royalty of several countries, and with some of the most powerful people in Europe, in the world. It was too easy, in this quiet contentment, to forget that Sherlock was dying. 

Otherwise the constant ache that threatened to overwhelm him. It permeated all that he did, from the shopping to making tea. If he managed to forget, for even a second or two, trimming the hedges or lost in a book, it would all come back when he looked at Sherlock. He understood why it had been called consumption for so long. Sherlock, always too skinny, now looked skeletal, waxy skin stretched taut over high cheekbones. His flesh seemed transparent, the veins starkly blue with oxygen deprivation. 

John tried to keep himself cheerful when Sherlock could see, but sometimes, watching Sherlock over the top of his book, his eyes would fill with tears and he would have to leave the room to go and cry as silently as possible where Sherlock couldn’t hear. Small, hiccupping sobs as of an inconsolable child. For there was no consolation. Sherlock was going to die, and there was nothing he or anyone else could do to stop it.

He could not imagine a life, his life, without Sherlock in it. They had been together so long, shared so much, that everything he saw, everything he looked at, could not help but remind him of their life together. 

***

_For Sherlock the days took on a kind of unreality as if he were already pulling away from earth, as if he had already stepped outside of himself. He would watch John fussing while simultaneously feeling that he was watching himself watching John. There was such a sense of interminable waiting coupled with a fear of time passing. Each day, would that be his last? Was this the last time he would speak with Caroline? With Gregor or Sarah, or any of his friends? Or John? And what of Mycroft, his half brother, his former handler? They were never going to be close. Mycroft sent a long letter from Majorca, where he had retired. In it he said much that they had never been able to say to one another, about how different circumstances of birth had led to such different starts in life. Sherlock had begun a half a dozen letters in reply but had torn them all up and burned them in the grate. The waiting reminded him of the early days of the war, the Great War, the first world war, although, he reflected this last one had certainly been great in scope. In those first days, the first months, there was such a boredom of waiting that one wanted something to happen, but it was all underlain by a blinding terror of what that thing might be._

_Men from the Ministry came and discussed official secrets acts in reverential tones. They seemed so very young and naïve that Sherlock had to fight to not laugh. There were so **earnest** , so very earnest that they seemed to not be real at all, but characters in a roman à clef. He was surprised to discover that he still had a little corner of resentment in his soul. Their lives were written on their smooth faces, their well-cut suits and oiled hair. Good family, though not titled, dropped from nobility to upper-middle class during the industrial age. They had been sent to a lesser public school then a decent but not remarkable second or first at University before being recruited. They were not defenders of the Empire, so much as defenders of the idea of the Empire, while the Empire was coming apart around them at an alarming speed. He resented them for the ease of their lives weighed against the struggles of his own. But he pitied them too, because the certainties upon which they, and so many others like them, had built their lives were no longer in place. _

_John hurried them along to save Sherlock’s strength and did not ask, bless him, about what they had discussed. And there were other visitors, less familiar. Some he had helped; some came, he knew, because of his reputation. He had thought that he and John had been so insular all of their lives. When had they accumulated so many friends?_

_Things that had once seemed important fell away. He would not finish his memoirs now, and while it had seemed imperative when he had first realized that he would not recover, now it was just a minor irritation. No more upsetting than discovering that they were out of boysenberry jam when he wanted it. John would finish the book. He had more patience for the actual writing things down. But he will romanticize it so, Sherlock thought crossly. I shall come out looking like King Arthur and Plato combined._

_Mostly he worried about John. It was John who would be alone. “Have I told him that I love him often enough? Does he know how he helped me?” The illness slowed his thinking, jumbled it. There were moments he forgot the time of day. There were times he forgot the year. John snapped at him when he called for Mrs. Hudson. “Mrs. Hudson’s been dead for twelve years. Not to mention that she stopped working for us in 1929,” John admonished._

_He liked when John snapped at him. In those moments he knew that John had forgotten that he was dying. It was good for John to forget sometimes. He would have such a long time to remember it after._

***

“What are you doing out here?” John asked, groggy and cross. “Why are you awake? It’s freezing out here. You’ll catch your de— you’ll give yourself pneumonia. Come back to bed.”

“I was tossing and turning and…and coughing. I didn’t want to wake you. God knows you need your sleep, you look exhausted.”

“Thanks,” said John, rubbing his hands through his short hair, making it stand on end. “I don’t mind…I’d rather you woke me. Do you want me to make some tea? At least start a fire?” He came over to where Sherlock was curled up on the sofa, and tucked the blankets tighter as if Sherlock were a child.

He isn’t young either, thought Sherlock, as he watched John try to relight the fire. John was hale for a man of seventy, but his hands were gnarled with arthritis and old injuries left him limping at the end of a long day. 

He reached out to take touch John’s shoulder. “Oh, leave the fire. I’ll come back to bed with you, where it’s warm.” 

***

Slow time rolled by. July turned over into August and the days were beautiful again. Sherlock spent most of his time in the garden, reading or just dozing. There were good days and bad days, but the nights were always bad. Feverish and sweating, Sherlock would pull the sheets awry and—waking with a gasp—cough uncontrollably.

After changing sweat soaked sheets twice in one night, John left the room and returned with his doctor’s bag. He hadn’t practiced for years, but he kept the medicines up-to-date. He would jokingly say, “With the life Sherlock lives, having some medical supplies on hand can never go wrong.” Sherlock’s eyes widened when John pulled out the brown bottle and a syringe.

“My, my, I must really be on the edge of death, if you’re going to let me have morphine!” he quipped. 

John paused where he’d been laying out antiseptic and cotton wool. Sherlock could see his jaw clench and unclench. When he spoke, it was clear that he was keeping himself in check by sheer willpower. “How dare you joke about this? How dare you?” His looked at Sherlock, “How can you make jokes? I don’t want to give you morphine. I’ve put it off as long as I could, convincing myself that you didn’t need it, that you were stable and might have months… And to have you joke about it as if I made this decision lightly—”

“Don’t you think I know that I’m dying?” Sherlock snapped. “I can’t forget; I’m reminded with every agonizing breath!” Sherlock stopped, furious at his own fears. “I’m terrified, John. I’m terrified, and I’m angry, and I feel stupid and childish to be so afraid. I’ve lived my life in the certainty that I am right, and now I’m terrified that I’ve been wrong all along and that there is a God and that I’m going to meet him soon. How wretched is that? The cool, rational Sherlock Holmes reduced to a blubbering infant when faced with his own mortality.” The tirade took it out of him. He fell back against his pillow struggling against the broken sound of his own wet lungs. “I don’t know what else to do, John, except joke about it. I can’t fight it. I want to rail against it, but what’s the point? I try— I try and try to tell myself that I’ve had a good life, an amazing life with you, and find some way to be at peace. And I CAN’T. I don’t want to die. I hate watching you suffer and knowing that I can’t do anything to help you because I can’t help myself!” He turned his face into the pillows. 

The mattress dipped under John’s weight and then John’s warmth was around him, not embracing, just being. 

“I didn’t know you were afraid,” John whispered. “You seemed so calm, so accepting. I didn’t want to…to make you afraid, or…” John’s arms slipped around him and pulled him close, “I didn’t want…”

“You didn’t want to what?”

“I didn’t want to make you…to make you think you needed to stay because of me.”

“Oh, John. I do want to stay because of you. I look at you and I see how sad you look and I just…” 

“Oh, Sherlock, love, I…I want. I don’t want you to go.” 

Sherlock turned his head so that he could meet John’s lips with his own, then rolled over so that he could see John and kiss him properly. He knew his mouth must be stale, but John didn’t seem to mind.

His body, over which he had so little control these days, was responding in a way it hadn’t for months. “John, I…” he murmured, “I…I want you.”

John pulled back to look at him, “Are you sure. I don’t want to…can you?”

For answer Sherlock pulled John’s hand to his hardening cock. “Yes…slowly.”

John undid the drawstrings of Sherlock’s pajama bottoms and slipped his hand inside. The shock of John’s touch, after so long, made Sherlock whimper. It was too much. It was not enough. He lifted his hips, seeking more contact. He struggled to keep his breath steady so he wouldn’t begin to cough because he knew that John would stop if he did. 

John’s breath was against his neck, “Oh, Sherlock, I love you. I love you so much I can’t…”

It was taking too long, he would be close, and then it would slip away again. And John’s poor arthritic hands—surely they were cramping by now. He was on the verge of saying stop, it’s alright, but then he felt that tightening heat, the tension growing, and he was at last to the point of no return. “John, I’m close, so clo—” And he was—sharp and hard, almost painful. It was not the best orgasm of his life, but it had an aching poignancy to it because he knew it would be his last. 

He couldn’t even help as John worked himself to completion, barely managing to return the kisses John groaned into his mouth.

***

_“You MUST tell the bees, John!” in the garden, a day in late-August, the bees humming sluggishly in the heat._

_“What?” says John._

_“You must tell the bees. Don’t forget. You must tell them when I die and as soon as possible. So they know and don’t fret. The hives will die. Tell them and they will tell the others. Say you’ll do it, John! Promise me!”_

_“I promise,” says John, although he doesn’t understand._

***

He’s still afraid of dying, not in the way that he said to John, a fear of a wrathful and judgmental God, but in the peculiar belief that we carry with us: how is it possible that the world will exist when we are gone? How can that be? John will remember him, but it will be John’s memories, clouded by John’s emotions. His self, his secret self will be lost, those thoughts and dreams that we keep hidden even from the dearest love of our hearts, either because we have a raw need to hold something completely inviolate and untouched by others, or because we cannot find the words, or a way to say them.

And even beyond that, the pure essence of ourselves, our soul, our life spark, whatever one calls it. Where does it go? Where can it possibly go? How can it be that there is a person one moment and then simply an empty and lifeless shell the next? No matter how many times one faces death—and he has seen others die—it retains the primal terror, a fear of the unknown and the dark.

He realizes, he has never truly faced death. The high possibility of death, but not the certainty. Even this—this absolute knowledge that he will die, and soon—does not quite seem real. You remember that you are dying, and you weep and wail, and protest; but then you are occupied and it slips from the front of your mind. You laugh and joke and even speak of the future, when it suddenly comes crashing back down, that you will not be here in the future, and you have to stop and grieve again, over and over.

At other times though, death feels like a chore, something that must be gotten through—like a trip to the doctor, or spring cleaning—only there is no after, and you will not be aware, one supposes when it is finally upon you.

I will not even know that I’m dying, he thinks. Pity one cannot make notes as it happens. One moment you are conscious and then you are not—as you cannot remember the moment you fall asleep. Is it like that, even in cases of injury? You feel the pain, you feel yourself becoming weaker as your blood runs out, but does the final second, fraction of a second, seem just like the one just before, with no more warning than any other? And what of unexpected death—instantaneous—the bullet to the brain, the instant incineration of a bomb blast. Do you feel it? That would be awful—no matter how small a time—to have that just enough space to realize, but not enough to even formulate a thought of doing something. Someone falling, he thinks. Someone falling to their death—those seconds must seem interminable. Do you really review your entire life? In an accident, you don’t remember the impact. You are going along, and suddenly it’s after, the car crashed. Does the mind protect us—even in that last moment?

He thinks of Zeno’s paradox—ever approaching one’s destination, but mathematically unable to reach it. Or the new theories of Einstein and Oppenheimer on gravitational bubbles in space where time is frozen Perhaps that was death—to others you had stopped, but from one’s own perspective, did time continue to move, and all else seem to stop? 

Late September, St. Martin’s Summer, he agrees to sit in the garden. A few bees circle him, alight on his hand, on the blanket over his knees. One even kisses his cheek before rising to return to the hive.

He rambles about the bees and how some cultures believed that they could bridge the natural world and the underworld, and how John must protect the hives in winter. Then he sleeps. 

***

John had almost dozed off, Sherlock’s hand held loosely in his own, but he woke when he felt it, a shift of weight, when Sherlock’s hand became merely an inanimate object in his, nothing left at all.

“Oh, no, no, no, Sherlock, not yet, not yet,” John whispered, voice breaking as the tears started to flow. And soon he was sobbing, chest struggling to bring in air, as he soaked Sherlock’s hand with his tears. 

At last when his body could cry no more, he wiped his eyes and sat back in his chair, still holding Sherlock’s hand. After a while he spoke again, “I was thinking I could plant some peonies along the east side of the yard as something of a wind break. And you said that the bees like them.”

There was a long silence.

“The roses aren’t happy in that spot. They don’t get enough sun. And that boy didn’t tend the lilacs while we were away. He didn’t cut them back at all. We’ll be lucky to get decent blossoms next year.”

He was quiet for awhile more. Somewhere nearby a farmer was reaping; he could hear the sound of the tractor’s motor, the shouts to workers in between. Far away there might have been the whistle of a train. 

“I suppose I’ll have to decide whether to hire someone to tend the bees or have the hives taken away, now that you’re…that you’re…” He found he was crying, quietly this time, just wetness on his cheeks. 

There was silence again, until the shadows lengthened out towards the east. 

Finally he looked back at Sherlock. He slipped Sherlock’s now cool hands beneath the blanket and, pausing only to place one last tender kiss on Sherlock’s forehead, covered his face. “Good-bye, my love, my dearest, dearest friend.”

He went into the house and made the two calls that needed to be made. He turned the veranda lights on so that the coroner and the undertaker could find their way easily. Then he turned on all of the lights in the house, and sat down on the sofa and waited.

After the young doctor had come from town—not so young, really, he’d been young when they’d taken the cottage—to sign the death certificate, and the funeral director had taken the…taken Sherlock away, John went back out to the garden. The sun had set, but the sky was still a deepening purplish blue with just a blush in the east. Light enough to see by if you knew where you were going. 

The hives were nearly silent when he reached them, but as he waited a few bees emerged and circled his head. He began, stumbled, cleared his throat, and began again:

“Um, Sherlock’s gone. He—he died. You might have seen him. He died here. I mean here in the garden. Oh, God, what am I doing? Anyway, he…loved you. Or admired you, or had an affinity for you. And it was awfully important to him that I come and tell you, and now I have, alright? Now you know…go and tell…whoever you tell…or whatever you do.” He turned to go back to the house, but then stopped and looked back, “Um, thank you?”

The bees made a few more lazy orbits—or so it seemed—and returned to the hive.

When nothing else happened, John went back to the house where the lights still blazed. He shuttered the windows and latched the doors. Too late he realized the tea set was still in the garden, but it didn’t matter. What could it matter now?

It came as a shock, sometime later, to find himself standing at the drinks cabinet, the whisky bottle in one hand, the morphine in the other. Was there any reason not to? He had friends, but they were not dependent on him. Harry and her family would be sad. Caroline would be sad. He was gone past seventy now, a long life well-lived they would say. It would make so much easy sense. He could pin a note to the door, or go into town and slip one under Dr. Millar’s door to be found in the morning. And then he could sleep, just sleep, with no dreams, no remembering. Because even if he drank himself into a stupor, there would always be the waking up and feeling this agony anew. 

At last he put down the dark brown bottle with its black rubber stopper, poured himself three fingers of whisky and downed it. Poured himself another and downed it too. “That,” he thought, “was a disgraceful abuse of a very fine whiskey.” He threw back another. The room was tilting a bit by now, so he sat down. And the pain was not quite as sharp.

The funeral parlour gave Sherlock’s skin more color than it ever had in life: a rosiness that was strange and off-putting. How peculiar it was, to look at him, this body that he had known so intimately. Every inch, it seemed explored with touch and taste and scent. The mole on Sherlock’s lower back, the keloid scar from a cut with a dull and jagged edge that healed badly, a recent bruise from when Sherlock stumbled against the kitchen table.

And all that was nothing, a stranger’s body with nothing now inside. John didn’t cry at the viewing or the graveside. Whatever was Sherlock was gone in the garden, perhaps to the bees.

***

“Why didn’t you come to me?” Caroline asked. They were in the conservatory of her Mayfair townhouse. The only light in the room came from the white fairy lights on the tall spruce in the corner, and the dancing light of the fire. 

“You were abroad.”

“Oh, so I was. I would have come back. I came back for the funeral. If I’d realized you were bumping around that cottage on your own, I’d have brought you back then—had the chauffeur carry you bodily if need be.”

They sat in companionable silence until Caroline asked, “How close did you come?”

“Pardon?” said John.

“How close did you come to going with him, when he died? The night he died. There’s no shame in admitting that you thought of it. You know...well, you know that I thought of it. Then and for a long time after. I found it would come upon me, suddenly. The thought that there was nothing really holding me here. But there is. There always is, even if it’s the absurd thought that you never wrote that thank you letter to Lord and Lady Douglas or that one’s favorite great-niece has a birthday party in a week and will be so upset that you’re not there.” She smiled, “We’re British. We hate to make a fuss.”

_John remembers a frantic phone call, 1944. Sherlock off on some secret mission, the air raid sirens already sounded, Caroline’s maid, sobbing on the line: Caroline gone mad, smashing furniture, screaming, a telegram.. Creeping through the blackout to help his friend._

_Making Caroline take syrup of Ipecac and holding the basin until the heaving had stopped. Taking the telegram “We regret to inform you…” from her hand and putting it away in a drawer. It wasn’t his to destroy._

“Did you really want to die?” John asked.

“Yes. No. I thought so. I certainly wanted to the next morning when you and Jeannie dumped me into a cold bath. And when I had to remember all over again that I was still in the world and he was not. That’s the problem with hiding, isn’t it? Eventually you have to come out.

‘I still…sometimes, on VE day, his birthday. The waste—that I’ve had all this time, when he had so little. Sometimes I realize that he’d be twenty-six now probably married, or going with someone, having a home and a child of his own, and then I think how he’d chide his old mum for her foolishness. When…when his father died, there was no question. I had to keep living for him, but with him gone…” She shook her head to clear old ghosts.

“And you?” she continued.

“Do I still want to die? No, I don’t think so. Perhaps at night, in an empty bed, but as you said, there’s always something. I have to finish his biography. I’m his Boswell.”

***

John stayed in London for the winter, undecided about what to do with the cottage. And so in April he returned. It was not as painful as he had expected, to see their old familiar things, although he took to sleeping in the guest room with its single bed. He returned to his notes and began to work on Sherlock’s biography again which made him feel useful. And feel that Sherlock was not entirely gone; he lived on in his cases, in the mysteries and puzzles that he’d solved. 

He was in the study when he heard the bell. The villagers dropped by more often than John liked, and he was too polite to tell them to stop when they so clearly meant to be kind. But his writing had been going well before the interruption, and so he opened the door with less good grace than usual.

“Yes?”

With an American accent the girl said, “My name’s Annie, Annie Lowell. I’m looking for Mr. Holmes.”

“Why do you want him?” snapped John. She was taller than he, her hair a vibrant red, shoulder length in waves, with a bit of sunburn and freckles across her forehead and nose. She wore dungarees and a floral printed shirt and reminded John of the land girls from a decade before.

And now she looked abashed, “I…I think we might be related, his father’s sister—who immigrated to America—was my grandmother, so cousins—” 

“He’s dead. He died last year. You’re too late.”

“Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that I missed him. From what I’ve heard, he was amazing, brilliant. I was researching our family and I was so excited when I realized that we must be related.” She fidgeted “I don’t suppose I could have a look around. I mean, only I’ve come such a long way…no, I suppose not. How rude of me. Thank you for your time.”

She started back up the path, stopping suddenly to look over the fence to the garden. “Oh, you have bees! I’ve always had an affinity for bees. Cathy, look, bees!” she called to the driver in the waiting convertible, a dark-haired woman in a green headscarf and large sunglasses. And suddenly John knew, knew that they were more than friends, just as he and Sherlock had been. It startled him, although he’d met many lesbians. She seemed so young and fresh faced. And American. Which was an absurd thing to think, and he knew it. 

“Wait,” John called. “Where did you say you’d come from? And all the way from London today? Come in. You must be tired—and your friend too. I’ll make some tea and we’ll take it in the garden. I can show you some of his notebooks. I’m his biographer, you know.” 

She turned and grinned, a wide, lopsided grin that lit her face and made her look even younger than she was, and for just a moment John could see a bit of Sherlock in her excitement. “Thank you! Thank you so much, Mr…”

“Doctor,” John replied. “Doctor John Watson. Sherlock, Mr. Holmes, was my friend,” and he held the door open to welcome them in.


End file.
